Once again, famine has began to strike the Greater
Horn of Africa with apocalyptic force, with rows of fly-haunted corpses and the
skeletal orphans crouched in pain, the nomads and pastoralist desperately
scrambling for help. Despondent Somali mothers are
abandoning their dying children as they travel to engulf crisis centres in
Kenya and Ethiopia. Because there is always a
tendency to find a solution that is smart, simple, and immoral to every human
problem in Africa, states and their international backers tend to have a linear
or at best binary logic and way of thinking that cast scepticism in their
collective aptitude that is inadequate to unravel the many complex
inter-relationships underlying vulnerability.
The article suggests that an international
elite made up of public intellectuals that can advance highly qualified research and policy reflection
are indispensable elements to continually
remodel, expand, renovate, cultivate, and develop sustainable solutions to the
Horn’s famine.
Josette Sheeran, executive director
of WFP told a conference in Rome in 2011 that a combination of natural disaster
and regional conflict was affecting more than 12 million. "We are seeing
all the points able to distribute food completely overwhelmed," she said,
adding that a camp in Dadaab in Kenya that was built for 90,000 people now
housed 400,000. I believe it is the children's famine, because the ones who are
the weakest are the children and those are the ones we're seeing are the least
likely to make it… we've heard of women making the horrible choice of leaving
behind their weaker children to save the stronger ones or having children die
in their arms.
UNHCR spokesperson Adrian Edwards at the press
briefing, on 16 August 2011, at the Palais des Nations in Geneva said that an assessment of
mortality in one of four refugee camps at the Dollo Ado complex in Ethiopia has
found that death rates have reached alarming levels among new arrivals. Since
the Kobe refugee camp opened in June, an average of 10 children under the age
of five have died every day. While malnutrition is the leading cause of the
high mortality, suspected measles is compounding the problem. Across all Dollo
Ado sites we have seen 150 cases of suspected measles and 11 related deaths.
UNHCR in 2011 claimed that preliminary
assessments showed that an estimated 95 percent of the new arrivals were women
and children, with the majority in a very poor nutritional and health states.
The mission described the overall situation as desperate and called for urgent
humanitarian aid–particularly since local Ethiopians, themselves hit
hard by the drought, have been sharing their meagre supplies.
Has lessons been learned?
The famines
of the past few decades have indeed been a cruel test in Greater Horn of
Africa. While the outpouring sympathy and generous response of the
international community have been phenomenal, the actions of the firemen of international disasters
had brought to light some serious doubts about the ability of such fire
fighting interventions to reduce peoples' vulnerability. Today, the crises
assume new dimensions as changing production relations, spurred by
socio-economic adjustments set the pace of livelihood security. Conflicts, corruption, poverty, and pandemics now threaten the region
with a calamity unforeseen even during the Great Famine of the 1980s, so much
so that the G8 has made this a basket case for international action as Somalia
becomes a new insignia of human bestiality,
a failed or collapsed state, to use a nauseating acronym.
When the basic functions of the State are no longer performed, they breed
widespread internal conflict, revolutionary and ethnic wars, adverse regime
change, genocide, politicides, and de facto or de jure loss of
state authority. The consequences have domestic effects in terms of conflict
trap, wild arms spending and economic consequences. The neighbourhood effects breed
conflict spill over and havens for terrorists. Determinants of potential state
failure are material deprivation of citizens: unfulfilled expectations,
difficulty of delivering quick results, urban bias, security constraints.
It also has international influences: openness to
trade, conflicts in neighbouring countries, large illicit influx of money,
corruption, foreign aid footprint. In addition, ‘war lords’ jockeying as states
men capture the regime. It is the
dilemma of re-building country
vs. the state; where alternative delivery mechanisms de-legitimise
government, slow the process of genuine institution building, advance an unrealistic
reform agenda, and focus on pseudo-democracy façade in response to multiple and
varied donor agenda.
Smart, simple, and immoral answers to complex problems
Hence,
the demand for some important attitudinal shifts among thinkers and policy
makers and the challenges of designing concepts and models that will help
harmonise the human dimension in development will never be more acute. Inspired
by a new orthodoxy that has evolved with the upsurge of professionalism on such
emerging ideals; the eighties had provided a fertile ground for the discourse
on the debate that ensued regarding human wellness which, in its own right, is
long, trying and, at times, counterproductive. Nevertheless, while many proposals for remedial action have been
formulated, real commitment
to positive and collaborative processes at inter‑organisational levels has
always been limited. Mobilizing the action required has also remained a
daunting challenge, as many practical and structural constraints militate
against commitment by individual groups to inter‑organisational initiatives nationally
and regionally.
Furthermore, the
tragedy taking such a heavy toll of life has highlighted fundamental weakness
of state five-year development strategies and emasculated actions of donors;
that are outpaced by the human emergencies that arise. This has ensued
questions about many preconceived notions and new ideas proposed, including
efforts that can be made to improve our understanding of human insecurity, to estimate
the risks resulting there from, accurately and to make adequate preventive
measures ahead of time.
Because
there is always a tendency to find a solution that is smart, simple, and
immoral to every human problem in Africa, states and their international
backers tend to have a linear or at best binary logic and way of thinking that cast
scepticism in their collective aptitude that is inadequate to unravel the many
complex inter-relationships underlying human vulnerability. It is neither popular nor scientific. Hence, the issue is about the
need for collective learning about responses, and the responsibility to those
whose suffering provided the basis for that learning which will never be more urgent
than it is now. Unfortunately, such lessons, which may be learned through the
shocks administered by an uncompromising reality, are rarely translated quickly
into personal or organisational memories and the inherent will to change.
The reasons for this are rooted in human inertia,
weakness, and self-interest and are equally often the products of a genuine
confusion about how to act most effectively in an environment that is growing
more complex. Unfortunately, it boils down to Shakespeare dictum, to
be or not to be is the question, whether it’s nobler in the mind to suffer the
slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune, or to take up arms and by opposing
them to end them, to die to sleep the heartache and shocks that the flesh is
heir to… It’s a consummation devoutly to be wished for, to die to sleep…
Jacques L.
Hamel underpins the Strategy of
Subversive Rationalization, emphasising the internalization of the scientific method and rational modes of thinking
as well as the assimilation of crucial scientific knowledge, as the
epistemological foundation of any kind of modernity; stressing the necessity of
revoking conformist, traditionalist or totalizing belief and knowledge systems,
worldviews and cultures that stand in the way to essential changes, a project
of liberalization, trans-nationalization, systematization and humanization
processes. Denials by leaders notwithstanding, it relies on calculative thinking as the most viable
civilised horizon of a potentially budding region, whose tortuous march to
modernity may necessitate an imaginative strand of thinking and a complementary
strategy.
Exultant techno-scientific
canons of belief need not lead inevitably to the profligacy industrial cultures.
They need not to be a model for an African modernity, which can avoid being
exceedingly obsessed, framed or ordered by technology. Humans, knowledge and
technology are co-emerging, coevolutive and mutually co-constitutive of each
other. Nevertheless, how does this ‘modernisation’ emerge under phantom states
in the Horn?
The
phantom opera
Daniel L. Byman of the Brookings Institution articulates
this as
Phantom states stoke wars, foster crime,
and make weak states even weaker. Leaders of phantom states champion state
control of the means and instruments of livelihoods and the right to national
self-determination while the countries from which they seek independence stress
the need for stable borders. Stuck between these incompatible principles,
phantom governments tend to point out uncomfortable precedents and double standards
and latch on to foreign patrons. Indeed, most phantoms survive in part because
of external support. Even when a phantom state becomes a genuine state, the
problems don’t necessarily end there.
Framing the conundrum of famine
agents correctly is as significant, if not equally eminent, as unpacking the
catch-22 predicaments that render nerveless the considered opinions of the fire
fighters in such a situation that lends itself to introspection of the complexity
and uncertainty such issue lend themselves to. The orthodox, if not democratic,
notion of famine victims demanding accountability from those fire fighters posits the existence of a
shared principled-cosmos wherein such accountability is encapsulated in shared
values – a paramount dictum of the recent African Union Summit in Addis Ababa
on Shared Values.
While the much
tooted climate change summits have
borne little fruit in terms of immediate action for a starving Horn, international
policy dialogue on these timely and apposite issues will legitimately enhance
leadership capacity to effect change in stemming the tide of hunger; however
constrained by their economic doctrines and ideological leanings they may be.
After all, leaders are expected to develop the capacity, through their
statements and actions, to shape debate, dialogue and morality, to determine
what is environmentally and socially acceptable, culturally sound and
politically uplifting. Indeed, policy leadership is a calling that requires
intimate knowledge of public policy analysis, formulation, management and
strategic plans to implementing them. This is especially important in the
region, where the policy imperatives involve trying to change attitudes and
behaviour of principalities that are only informed by violent conflicts for
many decades.
Notwithstanding
the Social Darwinism it might evoke (because, in practice, research on social mobility favours the
progeny of those who are already privileged in some way), meritocratic
governments stress talent, education and competence, rather than differences in
social class, ethnicity or sex.. In a
system where power is theoretically in the hands of elected representatives,
meritocratic elements include the use of knowledge to formulate policies. Nevertheless, while one of the
most compelling forms of passive demonstration of people’s will are free and
fair elections, historical evidence suggest that pluralism cannot be nurtured
in masqueraded ‘tribal’ elections and the turbulent, under-urbanized societies
in much of the Horn.
Indeed, an international
elite made up of public intellectuals that can advance highly qualified research and policy reflection
are indispensable elements to continually
remodel, expand, renovate, cultivate, and develop sustainable solutions to the
Horn’s famine. In the interminable faculty of such elite coalitions to
innovate and their unquenchable desire to reinvent, developed nations reap the
developmental booty of an exceedingly proactive and skilled entrepreneurial
leadership… This may be the only remaining option if we opt not to witness a
replay of the 1980’s horror of the Great African Famine. Preparedness,
prevention and mitigation must all be embedded in entrepreneurial development
and in the human security dictum of freedom
from fear and freedom from want.
Quo Vadis! The Horn
The central hypothesis in human security development is that the
relative strength of political organisations determines the rules of the
political game that are installed. It requires a plural set of political
organisations which promote and protect rules of peaceful political
participation and competition. Together, plural organisations plus rules of
accountability ensure control of the state executive. In taking an
institutional perspective, we assume that actors in the political system
express preferences through organisations and that these organisations vary in
strength according to their resource base. A far-reaching agenda of security reform and the significant start that has been made with a succession
of AU resolutions including the fact that the Constitutive Act of the AU
precludes as a member any state that take's power by unconstitutional means is
a necessary milestone, which can be followed by deepening constitutionalism and adopting ever-higher
standards for human security. More than any other regions in Africa, the
sub-Region needs a workable and coherent peace and security architecture.
In the long term, security is best guaranteed by
democratic, accountable and stable states and assertive civil societies, presiding over and driving human
development. Nevertheless, the international community has also a duty under
the ambit of the 'responsibility to protect'. The
concept of the has been unanimously embraced by the UN GA in the UN 60th
Anniversary World Summit in September 2005, and reaffirmed subsequently by
the Security Council. Unlike many declarations that have preceded it, one can
witness the emergence of what can reasonably be described as a brand new
international norm that removes the thin veneer of sovereignty from states and
a novelty in the conduct of international relations: from ‘non-interference to
non-indifference’. This requires
- Policy and Programme Framework: Policy and Programme Framework defines the stakeholder commitments, strategic coordination of political, policy and programme interventions and partnership framework
- Partnership: the sub-region's response to human insecurity must be based on a commitment to ensure that solutions to the challenges of security and development arise from an enhanced capacity of individuals, families, communities and institutions to understand the nature of insecurity in own contexts.
- Strategic coordination of political interventions is required to address it in adequate scope and depth.
- A Code of Practice will contribute to on‑going efforts by the partnership towards commitment to the use of standard human security management practices and encourage societies and polities to develop a collective capacity for advocacy…
